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Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Richard Rhodes. 731 pp. Simon and Schuster, 1995. $32.50 cloth, $16.00 paper.
Named after the ominous application of isotopes of the sun's fuel, hydrogen, to make H-bombs, Dark Sun follows in the footsteps of its Pulitzer Prize-winning predecessor, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It boldly and ambitiously covers the penetration of the Manhattan Project by the Soviet KGB, the U.S. hydrogenbomb program, the Soviet atomic- and hydrogen-bomb programs, and the impact of nuclear weapons on some aspects of the Cold War.
Although the coverage of nuclear plotters Klaus Fuchs, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Morris and Lona Cohen, Harry Gold, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and David Greenglass occupies about onefourth of the book, I found it both riveting to read and useful in explaining the dynamics of that episode of covert technology transfer. By narrowing the technological choices, Fuchs saved the Soviet Union perhaps one or two years in its quest for the atomic bomb, but he did not significantly aid the Soviet hydrogen-bomb program,...